Thankful for my village

It takes a village....to develop a seriously good grading system for report cards. This year our district rolled out new report cards. We previously used a standards-based model of 1-4 with 3 being grade level and 4 being mastery of a year ahead. In art, students were assessed in two areas. We now have three areas to grade: art content, conduct and effort. The parents only see the letter labels so our amazing department put together a rubric to think through what each label means. I have been using sentences from the rubric on the report card comment section because they are so helpful. Since providing thoughtful comments can be tricky when you're working alone I wanted to share them out.

Bobbleheads

My first student batch of bobbleheads fresh from the oven. These are miniature (about 3" tall) made from sculpey. As a STEAM challenge, students had to weigh their material on a scale and were only allowed 2oz (equal to one brick) of polymer clay (We used Sculpey III). They could swap colors with friends or me to get up to that amount.

Ready for this Gelli

After taking the Art of Education's course "Strategies for Art Educators" I was ready to get my students gelli printing. Thanks to a generous donation from my school's PTA and some artsonia funds that had accrued we were able to order (24) 5x5" gelli plates from blick.















I experimented with my own gelli prints at home for a few weeks, troubleshooting the process and imagining it with 24 bodies in action. I decided to start with traditional printing methods and ease into the gelli prints. Simply put, I didn't think they were ready for this Gelli. They created oil pastel self portraits on 6x9 plastic plates. These were transferred onto damp paper. We repeated this for a second week so students would have more prints to choose from.

Then they created the gelli prints. Using bubble wrap and textured stampers they made four prints each in one class period. During the last class they looked at pop art examples and assembled their own. The could use 1, 2, 3 or 4 self portraits and a range of composition strategies. The work was amazing and they had a great time.

If you'd like to try this lesson in your classroom but would rather skip the lesson plan writing, check it out here.

The Evolution of Bobbleheads

My daughter made a bobblehead in fourth grade using plaster, a pencil and a styrofoam cup. It took her close to two months in art class, and about halfway through she was already "over it" so I had written it off as a possibility for my own class. After seeing the adorable lesson on Bobbleheads from Cassie Stephens, I decided I had to consider it. Since it's May and each grade level already worked with clay I thought about other materials. I've had a bunch of sculpey leftover from a grant a few years back and decided to give it a try at home.

Working in reverse I started looking for information to share with the students about bobbleheads and was overwhelmed with the information on the bobblehead hall of fame website. I didn't realize there was such a long and rich history. One piece of information struck me as possibly outdated so I did a fresh search for the largest bobblehead created and found that this Guiness record has changed a few times over the past decade. My students love facts like that, so I'm going to be sure to include that in their introduction. 

I like the element of balance and it got me thinking to how I will portion out the material. Although I've never tried it, I would like to bring in a small postal scale and have the students weigh their sculpey and give the project a maximum weight. This is shaping up to be a great STEAM lesson.